The State of DDoS Weapons

DDoS attacks continue to grow in frequency, intensity, and sophistication. However, the delivery method of using infected botnets and vulnerable servers to perform crushing attacks on a massive scale has not changed. Unlike other cyber attacks, where attackers leverage obfuscation to prevent detection, the loud distributed nature of DDoS attacks creates opportunities for defenders to take a proactive approach by focusing on the weapon’s location.

Attackers leverage vulnerabilities in the UDP protocol to spoof the target’s IP address and exploit vulnerabilities in servers that initiate a reflected response. This strategy amplifies the attack by producing server responses that are much larger than the initial requests.

 

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